Financial institutions have established various processes related to the exchange of documents evidencing monetary transactions. Such documents have historically been encoded with magnetic ink so that information from the documents can be read by machine. Such documents have thus become known as magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) documents. The MICR information is sometimes called the MICR “codeline” since it appears in a line across the bottom of a check. Check processing and sorting systems have also been developed in which a check or similar MICR document has its image captured and stored electronically. Such an image can be archived so that it is indexed with its accompanying data from the MICR read as well as additional information such as the capture date and time.
In high-speed check processing, errors occur where the image captured for a check is stored and indexed with MICR information for a different account. Typically, such an error occurs due to either a “piggyback” where half of one check overlays another in a sorting and/or imaging system, or an image that was not properly recovered while clearing a jam, thus causing the images and MICR codeline data being processed to lose synchronization. Modern banks typically provide on-line banking systems to customers so that customers can retrieve stored images of their checks. If an image is indexed with incorrect account information, it can be retrieved by the incorrect customer, resulting in a privacy breach.
To detect defects, commercially available image software employs technology to algorithmically analyze images and produce a repeatable result. Such algorithms can determine the length (for example, in bytes) of the image data, percent black pixels, checksums, or the contents of the document in the image (such as the codeline if the document is a check) by optical character recognition. Results of such an analysis can be stored for future reference.